He has financial problems, critics say, and no experience relevant to the job.

Insider buddies on the board helped him into a $396,000-a-year job, they say, at the expense of all that was once holy in Happy Valley.

'I didn’t need this job’

Joyner confronts the criticism with a candor that belies the argument.

Yes, he has had financial problems. He confronted them and they are in the past.

Yes, he has experience relevant to the job. And no, his buddies did not arrange a job for him.

In the wake of the scandal and the firing of Paterno, who died of lung cancer Jan. 22, Joyner said he read a story out of Philadelphia speculating that he was being considered to fill in for Curley. Joyner said he went to newly appointed university President Rodney Erickson about the story, and Erickson asked Joyner if he’d be willing to take the job. So Joyner agreed.

Joyner did not deny that his longtime friend, Ira Lubert, the $12 billion Philadelphia real estate fund manager and fellow Penn State board member, also talked with Erickson about the prospect. But he denied they went fishing for the job.

“That is absolutely untrue,” Joyner said.

“I didn’t need this job,” he said. “I had a very, very good job with a very successful company as well as my own consulting business. I wanted this job because I felt an obligation to help my university through perhaps the most difficult time in its history.”

Arguably, Joyner brings more outside experience and acumen to the job than most of his peers in the Big Ten.

David Brandon at the University of Michigan was CEO of Domino’s Pizza, and Morgan Burke at Purdue was an executive of Inland Steel Co., but they are the exceptions. Most athletic directors are former football players or coaches who moved straight into university administration and stayed there.

A product of Paterno

Joyner was in Joe Paterno’s first recruiting class.

“I am a product of the great system that Joe Paterno instituted here,” he said.

Joyner had been a chubby kid, who bloomed late into a state champion wrestler, built — as one colleague remembered it — “like a jukebox.”

His father was an electrical engineer who lost a leg in World War II and who moved his family to State College from Erie to manage what’s now the Murata Electronics plant.

His athletic skills were turning heads in multiple sports, but Joyner “felt like an engineer.”

"I always had a scientific thought process,” he said. “My father taught me that way.”

His father told him: “If I had to do it over again, I’d go into a profession. ... You like science, why don’t you think about being a doctor?”

So, Joyner studied pre-med and science. Along the way, he became a team captain and an All-American in two sports.

'I consider myself a coach'

Science and sports have never been far apart in Joyner’s mind, and his Penn State success has always opened doors.

As he finished his medical residency at Penn State Milton S. Hershey School of Medicine and launched a surgical career in Harrisburg, he also served on Gov. Dick Thornburgh’s Council for Physical Fitness and Sports. Over lunch at the Governor’s Mansion, he met people from the U.S. Olympic Committee who told him about sports medicine opportunities at the Olympic level.

Joyner was hooked.

“I said, ‘How do I get involved in this?’ They told me, and I applied,” he recalls.

“I think like an athlete, even in my medical practice — I consider myself a coach,” he said. “I’m coaching injured people to get back to life — whether you have a fractured hip or you’re a high-level athlete.”

He waited two years for the opportunity to try out for a position as a doctor to Olympic athletes. It came in 1985, and he was allowed at first to care for the U.S. basketball team at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs. Then came the Pan American Games in 1987 and the Olympic Festival in 1989.

In 1990, just five years after he was called up for tryouts, Joyner was named head physician for the U.S. Olympic team for the 1992 Olympic Winter Games in Albertville, France.

How did he go from new recruit to top dog in five years?

“You work hard and do a good job,” Joyner said.

The job required considerable administrative skill.

“You’re in charge of the well being of over 5,000 athletes, including physicians and athletic trainers, a staff in the 50s or 60s or 70s,” said Joyner. “You have to have the administrative and organizational skill set to set and format the proper interventions, proper timing, how you’re going to work with all those athletic teams.”

Joyner continued serving the Olympic Committee after the 1992 Winter Games in a variety of roles.

And the Penn State scandal is not his first rodeo.

Joyner was on the Games Administrative Board for Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994, when figure skater Tonya Harding admitted her involvement in an attack on competitor Nancy Kerrigan.

Joyner found himself in a small room with Olympic Committee heavyweights, including late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, debating whether Harding should be removed from the Olympic team.

“I’m sitting there with these people as a contributing member of this small group, to make decisions and high-level thought processes that don’t directly involve medicine — that was a great training ground for me,” Joyner said.

Financial problems emerge

After the 1992 Olympic Games, Joyner founded Joyner Sports Medicine Institute, which opened locations throughout Pennsylvania and in five other states before it was sold to NovaCare Inc. for an undisclosed sum in 1998.

After selling his company, Joyner joined the Penn State board of trustees in 2000, and was on the “Grand Destiny Campaign” to raise money for Penn State athletic program.

He began to buy real estate near State College and invest in ancillary business ventures.

He was no longer practicing surgery, so he let his hospital privileges lapse.

One of the businesses he and other Penn State alumni invested in was Mushin Inc. — better known in the midstate as C-5 Fitness, which operated a string of fitness centers in several states.

As many new businesses often do, Mushin went bankrupt.

“Some companies do go bankrupt, no matter what you do,” Joyner said. “I’m certainly not a venture capitalist, but I’m told that successful venture capitalists fail 85 percent of the time.”

Joyner was no longer chairman of the board at Mushin — he’d stepped down nearly two years before, he said — but he was still on the hook.

Joyner and his wife — along with another Penn State alumnus and his wife — had guaranteed two unsecured loans for the company’s operating expenses for a total of $3.6 million.

As the business began to fail, one of the banks came after Joyner.

He put the deeds for his three Centre County properties up as collateral, which bought some time, but not enough.

By the end of 2006, it was clear the new year was not going to be a happy one.

On Dec. 19, Joyner sold his home in Hummelstown to his wrestling buddy Ira Lubert, who still owns it and still allows Joyner to live there.

According to court records in Dauphin and Centre counties, the Joyner properties outside State College were already mortgaged and were insufficient to cover the outstanding debt incurred by Mushin.

Joyner’s partner had not pledged the $4 million in stock he’d expected him to, and both of them faced court judgments.

In the end, Joyner sold all the real estate — and more — to satisfy his obligations.

The sale included a $3 million Alpine mansion nestled half a mile up in the forest atop a hill five miles from the university.

“We used whatever assets were available,” Joyner said. “Some were real estate, some were others, and we satisfied our obligations because that’s what I’m about.”

According to court records it took nearly a year and a half, but by mid-May 2008, the banks had notified the courts that Joyner’s obligations were satisfied.

Some see that as simply another manifestation of Joyner’s integrity.

Joyner’s critics suggest that he is still obligated to Lubert, and that Lubert is really the one pulling the strings in Penn State athletics.

“That is absolutely untrue,” Joyner said. “Ira Lubert has never tried to influence me or inappropriately call upon the athletic department for any reason, and I’ve never seen Ira Lubert inject himself in a situation that was inappropriate.”

What the two have in common — beyond wrestling and a life-long friendship — is a sense of duty and obligation to Penn State.

Focus on the future

Joyner’s vision for the program going forward?

“Integrity, academics and winning national championships,” Joyner said. “That is the goal ... [and] to maximize the experience of the student athletes that depend on us.”

He said: “Penn State has had a great tradition in athletics, with academic integrity, and doing very well on the athletic field. I have the utmost respect for what has gone on here in the past as far as our athletic programs, and leadership that was here relative to our success on and off the field.

“We’re becoming 31 units working together for the betterment of everyone,” which is not unlike the Olympics, Joyner said. “They are a conglomerate of national governing bodies that work together toward a common goal. Yes, they have their individual goals, but it’s about the U.S. Olympic team. So, we have our individual goals, but this is about Penn State’s intercollegiate athletics and how can we be the most successful program that’s ever existed. We’re a greatly successful program, but everybody can get better.”

As for his critics, Joyner said, “I think they associate me with what happened to coach Paterno, so therefore I must be a bad guy. ... We may never change those people.

“Some don’t think the university did enough, and some think we did too much. I think the vast majority of the people, even if they feel one way or another, care more about the university and want to help the university move forward in a positive way, and I think with 550,000 [alumni] out there, we’ve got a lot of mass behind us, and this is a great university, so it’s gonna be OK.”

Featured Story

Get 'Today's Front Page' in your inbox

This newsletter is sent every morning at 6 a.m. and includes the morning's top stories, a full list of obituaries, links to comics and puzzles and the most recent news, sports and entertainment headlines.

optionalCheck here if you do not want to receive additional email offers and information.See our privacy policy

Thank you for signing up for 'Today's Front Page'

To view and subscribe to any of our other newsletters, please click here.